Adobe Photoshop CS4 software accelerates your path from imagination to imagery. Ideal for photographers, graphic designers, and web designers, the professional standard delivers new features such as automatic layer alignment and blending that enable advanced compositing. Live filters boost the comprehensive, nondestructiveediting toolset for increased flexibility. And a streamlined interface and new timesaving tools make your work flow faster.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended software delivers all the features in Photoshop CS4, plus new features for working with 3D imagery, motion-based content, and advanced image analysis. If you work in film, video, multimedia, 3D, manufacturing, architecture, engineering, medicine, or science, PhotoshopExtended is for you.

Adobe Photoshop CS4 software takes advantage of the latest graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware to deliver superior performance. The software offers a smooth pan and zoom experience that allows users to easily edit images at the highest magnification while maintaining clarity. The new Canvas Rotation tool makes it simple to rotate and work on an image from any angle.Photoshop CS4 helps keep work areas clutter-free with a new unified application frame, tab-based interface and self-adjusting panels that make it easy to quickly access advanced tools, and provide a more fluid way to interact with the application.

Adobe CS4 Extended includes all the new features of Photoshop CS4 plus the ability to manipulate 3D imagery easier than ever before. Now, creativity knows no bounds, as users can paint directly on 3D models and surfaces, merge 2-D files onto 3D images and animate 3D objects. The 3D engine has been rebuilt from the ground up to provide faster performance, allow editing of properties like light and the ability to create more realistic renderings with a new high-quality ray-tracer. Video professionals have the ability to turn any 3D object into a video display zone and can animate 3D objects and properties with ease. In addition, the core motion graphicsediting has been improved with more efficient single-key shortcuts.

Photoshop users may take a while to move to the new 64-bit version of Photoshop CS4, but it's an important development; meanwhile, CS4 offers plenty of other significant upgrades to keep 32-bit users happy. Photoshop now comes in both 32 - and 64-bit Windows Vista versions. The 64-bit edition will allow PCs with lots of RAM to work on very large images with less hard-disk swapping (ideally, no swapping at all), thus speeding up operations. With the shrinking amount of RAM available to modern PCs (due to a 4GB limit on 32-bit Windows versions and those operating systems' increasing hunger for RAM), that's a significant update.

Overall product features * Revolutionary new features, a fluid user experience, and improved access to the unrivaled power of Photoshop * A more intuitive user interface and new nondestructive editing features that put you in control, including the new Adjustments and Masks panels * New and revolutionary Content-Aware Scaling, advanced auto-blending that extends depth of field, and industry-leading editing and compositing with reengineered color-correction tools * Significant productivity enhancements that provide increased flexibility and enable you to leverage the power of today's faster graphics processors * Breakthrough 3D editing and compositing capabilities and improved video controls to dramatically expand your creative options * Comprehensive image analysis with enhanced measurement and counting tools, as well as support for DICOM images and MATLAB processing routines